Advisory

Onboarding Know Your Customer

Customer Onboarding and Know Your Customer processes in finance tend to be cumbersome and heterogeneous across organizations increasing management, monitoring, efficiency and overall cost problems for them.

Cetif Advisory created a secure and open technological and ecosystem platform for sharing the outcomes of customer Onboarding, KYC and related data processes among ecosystem participants through the use of a Blockchain/DLT to solve the problems highlighted above.

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Onboarding and Know Your Customer ("O-KYC") was born as an Ecosystem Project between 2020 and 2021, promoted by Cetif Advisory and developed in partnership with Cherry Chain and Intesa. Major players from the financial, energy and utilities sectors and - as institutional observers - the Bank of Italy and IVASS participated in this first phase of experimentation.

Several objectives were achieved at the end of the ecosystem project. A survey conducted with participants in the first phase of the trial found time savings of 46% in onboarding operations for the physical channel and 64% for the digital channel. Savings in economic terms were 40% for the physical channel and 60% for the digital channel.

With theproject's admission to Sandbox Regulatory, a further phase of experimentation began in May 2022, involving - in addition to the project team Cetif Advisory and partners - six major banking institutions, under the supervision of the Bank of Italy's Retail Payment Instruments and Services structure.

With this testing phase completed, the ecosystem platform will be ready to be brought to market.

Mission and goals

O-KYC's goal, from the outset, was to create a platform based on DLT/blockchain technology that would enable the complete digitization of onboarding and know-your-customer processes, particularly onerous and complex activities, for the financial industry. The solution from Cetif Advisory enables the sharing of certified customer data, also making it possible to update and integrate them progressively ("dynamic identity"), with a smooth and optimized customer experience for end users (customers) as well.

The experimentation proposed by Cetif Advisory within Sandbox Regulatory has, among its main objectives:

The creation of an ecosystem to enable information exchange;
The simplification of the onboarding process through the use of information available in the ecosystem;
The reduction of time and costs;
the ability for the user to be able to control their own data and authorize their certified sharing;
The assessment of regulatory and legal implications of O-KYC management.

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Our references

At Cetif Advisory the exchange of experience and knowledge creates ecosystems and networks that are fundamental to the development of innovative porogities. Find out what specific values characterize the lived experiences of those who contributed to the development of the idea.

Demetrio Migliorati (Mediolanum)

"For some time the "blockchain" community that gravitates around Cetif has been stimulated in its participation in sandbox regulations in the context of which particularly interesting "frontier" experiments and projects are being carried out. O-KYC is certainly one of these, [...] with a perspective particularly oriented towards respecting the privacy of each individual and his sacrosanct right to control "to whom" he gave the information and "to do what with it." Reasoning moreover on rewarding models for the transfer of data [...], allowed once again to emphasize the "value" of data and how much it "costs" to manage it with traditional procedures [...]"

Massimiliano Ugolini (Monte dei paschi di Siena)

"KYC is a complex and onerous process for the banking industry, and the solution designed and tested in Sandbox, along with other industries, can bring significant benefits to the digital transformation of the entire Italian system. Thanks to O-KYC, information is just a click away for all citizens/users, who can request services both in-person and online quickly and securely, while maintaining full control of their data. [...] Therefore, it will be appropriate to continue the path started with Sandbox and, thanks to the active presence of prestigious institutions such asUniversità Cattolica , Bank of Italy and IVASS, to quickly reach the launch of a first production version."

Peter Franchini (IVASS)

"TheIVASS participates with increasing interest in sandbox initiatives promoted by the academy and the market. For the Regulatory Authority, it is essential to monitor new solutions, assessing their ability to improve the efficiency of the sector, simplify compliance and achieve full compliance with regulatory requirements. Particular attention is paid to the aspects of privacy and consumer protection, which must always be present and not be compressed by the - certainly relevant - needs of operators in terms of speed and cost-effectiveness of the various stages of the customer onboarding process."